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GENERAL SAMUEL 
CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG 

FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS, 1913 



By 
HENRY PITT WARREN. L.H.D. 

Headmaster of the Albany Academy 
Albany-, N. Y. 



REPRINTED FROM THE "SOUTHERN WORKMAN' 



GENERAL SAMUEL 
CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG 

FOUNDER'S DAY ADDRESS, 1913 



By 
HENRY PITT WARREN, L.H. D. 

Hf.ad.mastkr ok the Albany Academy- 

AlBANV, N. Y. 



REPRINTED FROM THK " SOUTHERN WORKMAN" 



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GENERAL SAMUEL CHAPMAN 
ARMSTRONG 

An address delivered in Memorial Church, Hampton Institute, by 
Henry Pitt Warren, L.H.D., headmaster of The Albai^y Academy, 
Albany, New Yorlx:, on Sunday, February second, nineteen hundred and 
thirteen, in celebration of Founder^s Day. 

YEARS ago it was an honored custom in some parts of this 
pleasant Southland — perhaps it is today — for friends, months 
after they had lain away their dead and after time had dulled some- 
what the edge of sad memories and toil had diverted minds, to meet 
and in memorial service lovingly revive the face and form, the spirit 
and the work of the absent one. In this spirit we who knew General 
Armstrong and you to whom his name is but a lively tradition have 
assembled, and on the spot, too, which he tenderly loved and which 
he forever consecrated by his life and martyr death given freely to 
the upbuilding of two great sections of the American people whom 
the State and Society had sadly neglected — the Negro and the Indian. 
I can add nothing to the fascinating story of his life which his 
daughter has told most charmingly and sympathetically and to 
which loving college friends have contributed delightful details on 
occasions similar to this. It is my purpose today to review with you 
the conditions that educated General Armstrong and the way that 
he used his opportunities. 

We speak of a man's environment as though it was born with 
him but it is as old as the ages which have developed it. Every 
political, social, or religious idea which blesses man today existed in 
crude form in the twilight of history, and these ideas, highly developed 
are still often found in the minds of men alongside those which 
are most rudimentary. In the same community live the pantheist 
and the theist, the communist and the believer in private property, 
the anarchist and the respecter of law. More than this the same 
individual may hold the most rudimentary ideas along certain lines 
of thought and well-developed ideas along other lines of thought. 
A man may be a theist, a believer in private property, a firm sup- 
porter of law, and yet be saturated with race prejudice, which is as 



rudimentary as belief in ghosts and fairies. A man is well born if 
his family has accepted and assimilated the essentials of the wisdom 
of the ages until, as General Armstrong well put it, that wisdom has 
become instinct. Wealth has nothing do to with this directly, 
unless, as often happens, a family has learned to keep money in its 
place, for money, like fire, is a useful servant but a bad master. 

Measured by my standards Samuel Chapman Armstrong was 
well-born — supremely well-born. His father was a Scotch Irish 
Presbyterian, his mother a New England Puritan, the two most virile 
strains in our political and religious history. 

They were born during the period when American rural life had 
attained its greatest perfection. The population of the country, 
even in New England, was still overwhemingly rural just as it Avas 
in the South at the close of the Civil War and as it is today. 
Each state was practically an aggregation of small farms tilled by 
their owners and their children, assisted perhaps by the son of a 
neighbor. Foreigners were unknown; there were no alien religions 
or hostile theories of government. Machinery, too, was unknown; 
daily toil, menial toil, if you please, was practically the lot of all. 
Labor with the hands was held in the highest esteem, and the charm 
of it all was that the respect paid it was unconscious. Senator Hoar 
in his " Memoirs " notes with interest the fact that so many of his 
ancestors were engaged in what would be called menial employments. 
In this simple life the brothers of United States senators, jurists, and 
college professors milked their cows, groomed their horses, and from 
sun-up to sun-down, yes, from dawn to dark, performed the multi- 
farious duties that pertained to the carrying on of a well-appointed 
farm. They could neglect nothing, forget nothing, would they keep 
from ultimate bankruptcy. Each farmer was his own buyer and seller 
as well as his own producer. Thrift to such persons was a sacred duty, 
for out of it came the money for the refinements of home, edu- 
cation, and the church; if this thrift was perverted it became a god 
and men grovelled to it. Each farm was a daily school for the 
development of that mighty force which we call initiative. With this 
civilization, and an essential part of it, too, was the common school, 
often imperfectly taught but a power because of the earnestness 
of both teacher and pupil. Above it was the academy for the capa- 
ble and farther on the college for the winnowed wheat. Over each 
community in New England and the Middle States was a clergyman, 
college-bred, generally, who preached to these farmer folk a gospel 
as stern as was the daily life of his hearers; no other would have 



fitted it. The farm, the common school, and the church, working 
together, laid the foundations, the ground tier of virtues absolutely 
essential in life — persistency, frugality, honesty, and last, but not 
least, the love of man, the fruit of love of God. In my judgment 
the brightest single flower in God's garden, in all the ages, was the 
American farm home during the two decades between 1820 and 1840, 
before the harnessing of steam, when children swarmed on every 
threshold, when house and field were alive with activity, when manual 
labor was respected, and when the higher education was for those 
capable of large things. The proof of this is the fact that when 
steam was harnessed and invention was stimulated by the prospect of 
great rewards, the training given by rural life sent the country ahead 
by leaps and bounds. It was at this period that men once more 
grasped the truth that the love of Christ was for diffusion, not for self- 
preservation, and through Boards without number thev began to 
spread the story of Christ's love to men. It was then that Philan- 
thropy awoke. 

General Armstrong's parents belonged to this fine farmer folk, 
and opportunity was soon given them to attempt to transplant the 
spirit and practice of this simple life to Hawaii, where lived 
a pleasure-loving, indolent, but kindly people of untried capa- 
bilities. The labor of missionaries led them to formally accept 
Christianity, and such was their confidence in their new-found friends 
that they practically handed over to them the shaping of the political 
future of the Islands. Richard Armstrong, who, with his wife,had been 
in the Islands since 1831, was made Superintendent of Public In- 
struction, member of the Privy Council of the King and of the House 
of Nobles, and trustee of half a score of societies. He pushed with 
zeal elementary education and in a few years the younger generation 
could read as readily as though born in Ohio or New Hampshire. 
With the aid of generous gifts of money and labor the missionaries 
built huge churches and filled them with an eager people. The 
Hawaiian seemed to have what Henry Ward Beecher called "a genius 
for religion." But the missionaries were Protestants and could not, 
like the Jesuit fathers of Paraguay and California, gather their dusky 
children for morning and evening prayers, nor stimulate their imagina- 
tion with processionals and miracle plays. The bridge from Sunday 
to Sunday was a long one and swayed badly in the winds of tempta- 
tion until, as General Armstrong sadly said, a Sandwich Island saint 
was about equal to a New England sinner. Work they would not, 
for the bright sunshine and fertile soil freed them from the necessity 
of regalar toil, and the comfortable theory of natural inferiority had 



to be invoked to explain the failure of this people to progress. 
Aliens stepped in and built up agriculture and business, and the 
natives, genial, affectionate, and hospitable, remain children, with- 
out a history and without hope of a future. 

I have somewhat elaborated this attempt to civilize the Ha- 
waiians, for in the providence of God it was the school which trained 
Samuel Chapman Armstrong for his life-work. He was his father's 
associate and helper during the years of his later boyhood, traversed 
the Islands with him and came to know thoroughly the grown-up 
children, whom he loved in his hearty, honest way, but whom at the 
time he hardly took seriously, for he was but a boy of twenty — 
a glorious, rollicking boy, a magnificent animal with the grace of a 
Mohawk Indian and the unconsciousness as well. His smile was 
winning, his intellect was keen, he had a fine contempt for the com- 
monplace, and if he had the imperiousness of manner likely to come 
to those who have to do with inferiors in age or capacity, as to so 
many kindly Southern gentlemen, it, too, was all unconscious. He 
left the Islands with tender memories of family and friends, and 
carried a haunting memory which never left him of the blue encir- 
cling waters in which he had sported and over which he had sailed, 
of the noble mountains filled with angry demons, and of the kindly, 
simple folk whom he had been taught to protect. 

Then came two years at Williams College, joyous, wholesome 
years, when he sat at the feet of that great, kindly. Christian philoso- 
pher, Mark Hopkins. Then the war, a captain at twenty-two, seiz- 
ing a soldier's opportunity at Gettysburg to deal a telling blow on 
the flank of Pickett's heroes in their famous charge, then a major — 
but he was impatient. What to him was the constitutional question 
for which North and South were fighting ? This was their quarrel, 
not his. He was a Sandwich Islander, a child of the world, if you 
please, as are most missionary children. He had entered the service 
largely through a spirit of adventure, drawn to it by the cro>wd of 
bright, earnest college graduates who in the year 1862 joined the 
Union army largely as officers. The North, desperate because of the 
wonderful fight put up by the South, in its need of men turned to the 
Negro race and in 1863 began to enlist black men, yesterday slaves. 
It was perilously near to inciting Negro insurrection; the South so 
looked upon the act and this explains the stern legislation at Rich- 
mond, which, however, was never enforced, for the Negro as a soldier 
was never an insurrectionist or a brigand. He fought in the open. 
This was Major Armstrong's opportunity ; he applied for colonelcy 
in a Negro regiment and was accepted. His life-work had begun. 



The circle was complete from service in the Hawaiian Islands to ser- 
vice in America. " The call of the wild "" was eagerly answered 
and the professional soldier became the Christian knight, eager to 
hit hard the institution which robbed man of his manhood in America, 
as his missionary parents had hit hard the indolence, loose living, 
and superstition which sapped the manhood of the Hawaiians. He 
drilled his men to a finish and thirsted for an opportunity to show 
the stuff that they were made of. The opportunity came, and black 
men proved that while they could live patient slaves — biding God's 
time — they could die like heroes when the clock struck the hour. 
The war suddenly ended with the exhaustion of the South, and 
General Armstrong discovered that he had become an American 
citizen by the operation of a Federal statute giving citizenship to a 
foreigner serving in the army for three years. 

The war was over and throughout the South there was industrial 
chaos. Slavery had prevented the working of God's great law,the law of 
progress, and it fell. Sometimes we wonder how slavery in America, 
had it escaped the war, would have met the mighty progressive forces 
of the last fifty years, — the universal application of machinery, spe- 
cialization in industry, the dynamo, and above all the fierce democ- 
racy that is sweeping the world. Perhaps those conservative men of 
South and North who were derided by fire-eater and abolitionist felt 
the breath of these onrushing forces when they prayed for patience. 
If the white was stunned, the Negro was bewildered. He had never 
bought for himself food or clothing, hardly a jackknife. He was 
practically without knowledge of values. He was cursed with the 
improvidence which results from ignorance, as well as with absolute 
poverty. It is doubtful if the possessions of the Negroes of the South 
in April 1865 would have averaged, in cash value, five dollars to the 
family, and they did not own the equivalent of a township of land 
six miles square. You can search history in vain for such poverty 
and yet it was borne with hardly a murmur by ex-slave and former 
master, who was stripped of everything save the bare land. 

The keen-witted young Brigadier had been studying the Negro 
during the year and a half that he had commanded a black regiment 
and later a black brigade, and while he was moving about as an 
officer of the Freedmen's Bureau amid the wreckage in Eastern 
Virginia. He studied the Negro and his needs directly and then by 
comparison with the undeveloped people whom he knew — the Sand- 
wich Islanders — and what did he find? First, that the Negro had 
but little directive energy. Slavery wanted machines, not men, and 
must stifle any attempt to develop real leadership. The result was 



pitiful at emancipation. The ex-slaves were without natural leaders 
and, when black men of superior force of character did assert them- 
selves, they were looked upon with suspicion. Slavery did what the 
unscrupulous press and demagogues are doing today in this country; it 
destroyed confidence of man in man and, unless I have been a dull 
observer, this same lack of confidence still retards the progress of the 
Negro. There can be no advancement until there is hearty accept- 
ance of leaders and faith in them. Slavery made men suspicious 
one of another, broke down faith of man in man, and prevented 
the true organization of society. Had there been a few thousand 
men among the Negroes at the close of the war recognized as 
leaders, the race would have advanced by leaps and bounds, for never 
has a people shown such eagerness for the best for their children or 
been willing to make such sacrifices for them. The lack of directive 
energy in the Negro was in my judgment the fruit of slavery, not 
a racial weakness. 

Added to this was contempt for manual labor. This was per- 
fectly natural by the simple law of association. The manual laborer 
of the South had been a slave. The two terms were interconvertible: 
laborer — slave, slave — laborer. Get away from manual labor if you 
would emerge from slavery. But poverty, grim poverty, compelled 
the Negro to toil with his hands. Then let him do the least possible 
and seek employment the farthest removed from its grime. The logic 
is weak, the result was pitiable, but it was all perfectly natural. 
Pride in the work that is at hand, even if it is humble, marks the 
summit, not the low level of civilization. 

Worse than the lack of directive energy and his contempt for 
manual labor was the low standard of honor and morality in the 
colored man. The atmosphere of fear into which he was born cre- 
ated the one, and slavery, with its denial of family rights, was responsi- 
ble for the other. 

No one saw this gloomy picture more clearly than General 
Armstrong, but this was not all. He saw that the ex-slave was more 
unmoral than immoral and that he had grasped, through the teaching 
of noble Southern masters and mistresses, the rudiments of Christian- 
ity. If his theology was sounder than his life, there were many 
Uncle Toms who had seen the vision, who had learned that man's 
dominion ended with the body, that the soul is God's. I know that 
our cynical American humor makes light of the Negro preacher and 
his tumultuous audience, but thoughtful Southern men did not when 
fifty years ago they left wife and children to the care of their black 
bondsmen and went forth to win constitutional privileges for them- 
selves and, shall I say it, perpetual servitude for their servants. 



9 

They relied upon a patience born of Christian faith and their trust 
was justified. The Negroes believed in the personality of God, in his 
love as shown by a living, dying Saviour, his hatred of sin and love 
of the sinner, and the crown of righteousness that awaited the faith- 
ful ; and if their morals sadly lacked consistency, if they unduly 
emphasized the pitying love of God, sympathetic friends like General 
Armstrong knew that when their faith came to be as intelligent as it 
was unquestioned, it would inevitably straighten out their lives, I 
should as soon think of smiling at the pothooks of an earnest child 
struggling with the alphabet as at the blind, stumbling search for 
God of the African slave. In my youth I made half an apology for 
slavery to the veteran Dr. Lindley, by birth a Southern man and a 
graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for 
twenty years pastor of a great church in North Carolina (whose mem- 
bership was part slave), and for many years a missionary in South 
Africa. I can see his kindly, searching look as he said, "" When I con- 
trast the degradation of the African in his kraal with the condition 
of the American slave in his cabin, I feel that were I that slave I should 
want a thousand years of eternity in which to praise God that I was 
born an American slave, but if I were his master I should want ten 
thousand years to plead with God for pardon that I ever held him a 
slave. " 

The men who were true to mistress and children during the war 
waged to perpetuate their condition, who, as Union soldiers, never 
maltreated a prisoner nor attempted to arouse an insurrection on slave 
soil, although in fighting strength about 200,000 men, and who never 
betrayed a Union soldier groping northward from a Confederate 
prison, a hunted fugitive, had certainly learned the elementary les- 
sons of Christianity. 

The remarkable adaptability of the Negro did not escape Gen- 
eral Armstrong. As he put it, " The Negro in a tight place is a 
genius." His unfailing good nature, his desire of appreciation, his 
good fellowship, were all to be counted on in his struggle upward. 
Moreover he saw great apparent earnestness to gain knowledge and if 
much of this was uncouncious imitation and the motive eagerness to 
get away from physical drudgery, he saw promise in it. 

But the Negro had made great strides in the forming of indus- 
trial habits, thanks to the iron regime of the plantation. Civilization 
rests upon the willingness of man to work from sun to sun, not one 
year but for a lifetime if necessary. There can be no national 
achievement, no public virtue without it. The Negro was not a will- 
ing worker for obvious reasons, but he worked ; he had the habit of 
work and this was a tremendous asset. What he needed was a new 



10 

spirit; not merely the recognition of the necessity for work but of 
the privilege of work, a point which most labor unions sadly miss. 
This habit of unremitting industry formed in slavery saved the Negro 
at his great crisis in 1865. The Indian missed it when he first 
attempted to follow in the white man's way and he still staggers for 
the lack of its steadying power, but he is adjusting himself remark- 
ably to his new condition. 

The splendid physical vigor of the Negro, too, attracted the 
admiration of the youthful General. The out-door life, the steady 
work, the plain but wholesome diet of the plantation, had built up a 
people of fine physique. There were no weakening taints in their 
blood. With this rare vigor went the habit of obedience, and if this 
at times was servile in its manifestations, the essential was there — 
respect for authority. The Negro must needs accept white leaders 
until he could develop his own. Besides, he was an American. Not 
a tradition of Africa lingered except possibly among the few Negroes 
whom Northern greed had smuggled into the coast plantations. The 
ignorant Negro spoke the English language better than a Yorkshire 
laborer spoke it one hundred years ago. He loved his neighborhood 
because he knew and loved its local traditions. " Born and bred 
here, bound to die here, " is a Negro saying often heard and always 
to be honored. The town Negro, with his larger outlook, had a state 
pride that would shame some of us. Moreover, they were overwhelm- 
ingly Protestant in religion, as were the white people of the South, and 
there was no possibility of controversy in matters spiritual. 

All these thoughts and many more passed in review through the 
active brain of the young Brigadier during the cruel years which 
followed emancipation, when he was in the service of the Freedmen's 
Bureau, bringing order out of chaos in this beautiful peninsula to 
which the Negroes had flocked by thousands during the war. A little 
school founded upon this spot was just starting. The Freedmen's 
Bureau was closing its work and what more natural than that this 
school should drop into the hands of General Armstrong forty-five 
years ago. He had a clean slate upon which to write his plan 
and he wrote it. The genius of the man is shown in this — that he 
never had occasion to erase a word. It was epoch-making in that 
it showed the proper method of educating a backward people and 
has powerfully influenced the education of the most favored. He 
turned back to his experiences in the Hawaiian Islands for light as 
well as inspiration ; he prayed for the consecrated spirit of his father 
and mother and for wisdom to avoid the mistake of confusing reli- 
gious enthusiasm and education with character. As he wisely put it, 
" In spite of possible material and intellectual advancement, absence 



H 

of character will be worse for the Negro and the world than mere 
ignorance. " In his report to his trustees in 1870 he says, " The 
object of this school is ( 1 ) to make men and women, not profound 
scholars; ( 2 ) to dignify labor;" — simple as the Apostles' Creed 
and as comprehensive. 

To this end he believed in co-education, and twenty years later 
said, " The Negro girl, both in school and as a worker for her peo- 
ple has been the surprise of our experience. " He dismissed at once 
the teaching of Latin and Greek, saying that Northern schools are 
everywhere open to Negroes of superior scholarship. He limited 
the curriculum to the common English branches and behind it all, 
andyor all, daily manual toil, not merely to earn support, but as a 
means of grace and hope of glory. 

He saw that the South was still a rural people and likely to 
remain such for another century. With the vision of a statesman 
he said, " Here on the land lies the future of the Negro. " Not 
like the Northern cry of "Back to the soil"" was his slogan, but 
" Stick to the soil ; sacrifice everything but honor and life, but get 
land. " His was not a vision of villages of black peons in gangs 
grimly doing daily tasks at the command of some great landowner. 
It was rather the dream of his parents who had sought but in vain 
to establish the rural life of New England of the thirties and forties 
among the ease-loving Sandwich Islanders. He saw thrifty Negro 
farmers living in decent houses surrounded by land sufficient 
to support their families, where might be developed the homely 
virtues of industry, order, thrift, self-control, and that mighty 
power which we call initiative, that guiding instinct which, as 
General Armstrong so tellingly put it, more than the capacity to 
learn from books, is the special advantage of our more favored 
race. On these farms could be earned money to support good 
schools and helpful churches, with something for God's poor at 
home and abroad; where neighborly sympathy should take the place 
of suspicion, and mutual helpfulness of jealousies and quarreling. 
Out of such homes would pass a small but constant stream of earnest 
boys and girls to trades, the more competent to become foremen, then 
masters, and so employers of labor, while the scholarly would find 
their way to high school and college. Those who had worked their 
way legitimately to the front, been naturally developed from the 
ranks of earnest toilers, would be sane and safe leaders. He expected 
that the majority would stick to the farms. 

To build the Negro into a self-respecting citizen from the ground 
up required more than classroom instruction even by such a devoted 
and capable body as the Hampton teachers, more than the object les- 



12 

son presented by its excellent model farm and the daily, intelligent, 
willing labor of the pupils. It meant the implanting of a new pur- 
pose which would carry the wholesome Sabbath atmosphere of this 
profoundly religious school into the rough week-day work of the world. 
Negro and Indian boys and girls, as they have caught here this spirit, 
have answered the prayer of General Armstrong, and become indus- 
trious, orderly, modest, thoughtful of others, and eager for service, 
and quietly into farmhouses, hamlets, and towns have carried the new 
life. Cabins have become houses, then homes, order has taken the 
place of confusion, thrift has banished improvidence, and quiet 
self-respect has driven out noisy assumption. 

I have purposely dwelt upon the main object of the educational 
work of Hampton — the development of respect for labor, agricultural 
labor primarily, for it underlay and still underlies all real advance- 
ment of the Negro in the South. But an integral part of this 
is the work of the common school, and in the preparation of men and 
women, especially women, to teach, this school has done noble service. 
Its pupils have received a training equaled in but few normal schools 
of the land. Sharing the homely life of the people, using any rude 
shelter for a schoolhouse, always believing that a teacher is greater 
than his tools, Bible readers on the Sabbath, nurses to the sick, these 
noble men and women have carried sweetness and light wherever 
they have gone. What wonder that superintendents have publicly 
honored this school which has developed such modest, efficient teachers. 
General Armstrong's vision of a great army of land-loving, land- 
holding Negro and Indian farmers is realized, just as the great North 
is once more awakening to respect for and interest in agriculture. 
Already the Negro, mainly in the South, holds in fee simple, 20,000,000 
acres of land — the area of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, 
and Connecticut— and rents 20,000,000 more. A decade hence he 
may have doubled his holdings. But Hampton stands for intensive 
farming, for Danish farming. Try to measure the output of these 
farms then, the backing that they can give to church and school, manu- 
facturing and business, and to intellectual and social advancement. 
In his prosperity the Negro has not forgotten the church, end into its 
buildings he has put more than $50,000,000, eight per cent of his 
hard-won savings. He gives yearly $150,000 to carry the gospel to 
those less fortunate than himself. He has not lost his early enthusiasm 
for education; 1,700,000 children crowd the Negro schools of these 
United States and 70 per cent of the Negroes know something of books. 
I have attempted to put in historic setting the story of General 
Armstrong's life; it would be incomplete if I failed to emphasize his 



13 

faith in you. In the years of his fierce activity his face was always 
to the front but when the hand of God enforced quiet he reviewed 
the past. It was then, in speaking of the Negro, that he uttered those 
memorable words, well-weighed and decisive: " There was then" — 
at the end of the war — " and has been since more in him than Me 
expected to find and more than his old master dreamed of." It is all 
that an honest white man can say, it is all that a candid Negro can 
ask, and it is enough, for it is full of hope. To that love of fair deal- 
ing, that spirit of fair play which has always in the long run charac- 
terized the Anglo-Saxon, I leave the Indian and the Negro, with 
absolute faith in the future of both. 



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